The GFAR Newsletter already featured an article on “Managing information on organizations, experts, projects and project outputs” (issue 4/2007), where distributed management and a coherent use of standards (metadata and protocols) were identified as the best approach in view of building comprehensive, reliable and integrated information services.
Over the last year, under the umbrella of the Coherence Initiative in Agricultural Research for Development (CIARD, earlier International Information Systems for Agricultural Science and Technology or IISAST), collaboration between the Global Forum and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in this area has become stronger. The adoption of a distributed approach based on metadata exchange is being advocated by both organizations. Common projects have been identified in the implementation of different types of global Directories, or Registries, giving access to distributed sources describing organizations, projects, projects outputs (documents) and experts, as well as news and events (and the same approach can be extended to other information items like job opportunities, grants etc.) in an agreed format.
Some of the metadata standards adopted are already widely used, others are under development: whenever possible, existing standards are re-used, otherwise new metadata sets are developed as Application Profiles (more information on the Agricultural Information Management Standards Website).
Some pilot projects have already been started, others are still at the planning stage.
Over the last year, under the umbrella of the Coherence Initiative in Agricultural Research for Development (CIARD, earlier International Information Systems for Agricultural Science and Technology or IISAST), collaboration between the Global Forum and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in this area has become stronger. The adoption of a distributed approach based on metadata exchange is being advocated by both organizations. Common projects have been identified in the implementation of different types of global Directories, or Registries, giving access to distributed sources describing organizations, projects, projects outputs (documents) and experts, as well as news and events (and the same approach can be extended to other information items like job opportunities, grants etc.) in an agreed format.
Some of the metadata standards adopted are already widely used, others are under development: whenever possible, existing standards are re-used, otherwise new metadata sets are developed as Application Profiles (more information on the Agricultural Information Management Standards Website).
Some pilot projects have already been started, others are still at the planning stage.
- FAO is adopting this approach in the new AGRIS architecture which will leverage the Open Archive design, which is in itself a distributed architecture based on metadata exchange.
- FAO, together with GFAR and other CIARD partners, has implemented AgriFeeds, “the agricultural news and events aggregator”, harvesting news and events feeds and exposing aggregated and customized feeds for further re-use; an extension of this service to information like job opportunities and grants is being considered.
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GFAR, FAO and Wageningen International are working on:
- AgriOrg, a Registry of distributed descriptions of organizations;
- AgriProjects, a Registry of projects.
- An AgriExperts directory is also planned.
Valeria Pesce (GFAR), Gauri Salokhe (FAO)